In Taiwan, adopting one to one clinical teaching, nurse preceptors play an influential role in the success of nurse education for undergraduate nursing students in their final clinical practice--" Last Mile Learning". However, evidence shows that inadequate preparation of formal education program for the preceptors, and lack of communication between the school and clinical teaching, hinders teaching efficacy. The necessity of establishing a clinical-academic partnership was advocated
Purpose:
The purpose of this project was to develop, implement and evaluate a collaborative program for the preceptors in facilitating their clinical teaching efficacy for nursing students.
Methods:
Workshops were implemented in middle Taiwan every other month, from March to September 2016. The lectures related to learning theory, the objects of clinical teaching, the methods of interacting with student nurse, and clinical evaluation method were performed in the first workshop. Then the participants were separated into small groups of10-12 members per group to discuss expectations of each other between school and hospital, share teaching strategies and exchange experiences of how to resolve student's learning problems in the clinical practice. The groups were facilitated by a senior faculty who was also the person to contact if preceptors had teaching problems. Preceptors were encouraged to upload their experiences and share ideas online. Additionally, teaching materials taught by the faculties in the classroom are accessible online as well for the clinical preceptors’ reference.
A total of 98 preceptors from 16 teaching hospitals were recruited for the program. A self-administered structural questionnaire including five dimensions, (i.e. “ Recognition of clinical teaching”, “ Implementation of teaching ”, “Expression of caring behaviors”, “ Performance of empathy”, “Empowerment for student ”), was administered at the beginning and the end of the project to evaluate the effectiveness of this project.
Results:
The results indicated that preceptors have significant improvements in their teaching efficacy after participating the program, and achieved statistical significance. In addition, there were 24 innovative teaching plans/strategies that were developed by the preceptors.
Conclusion:
The collaborative program enhanced more communication between the academia and clinical practice, provided teaching resources and support for the preceptors in assisting their clinical teaching, which have reflected on their improvement of teaching efficacy and innovative teaching plans.